Asian guys always say the same things: “Do you have a boyfriend?”
“No.”
“You must be lonely being by yourself.”
I am thinking, ‘Asian men typically don’t view women as completely human. Should I really be listening to your jabber when a dog will make a better companion?’

There was an earthquake for three seconds. Definitely not my first or longest earthquake experience but potentially my first Californian earthquake experience. Potentially because I couldn’t remember how many times I had been here, but people ask, “Oh, is it your first time to California?” To which I say “no”, but maybe it would be more helpful to say it is my first time living in California.

Anaheim as a toddler, San Diego as an elementary student, San Francisco to Anaheim as a high school student, Disneyland post-college, Orange County. Yep, been to California five times before moving here.

I think what is interesting about Gladwell’s analysis is that what America (and extension, the globe) values is massive return on investment. Who can take a small amount of cash and generate a large amount in a short amount of time. That is what is means to be successful – to tap new resources, to make a business more efficient, to create profits.

This can be generated by deceptive advertising of a product with no effect or a destructive one, chopping up an entire forest, releasing dangerous chemicals into the environment, laying off employees, only paying people minimum wage, tax evasion or loop-holes, flipping businesses/houses/cars – and more.

Does the benefits of modern technology, capitalist empires, and quick-profit investment models really give us-and I mean all of us-a better society? Or are we being short-changed so a few can be wealthy now? And do we really respect them for that … or just envy them? Should we envy them at all?

I kind of love this. I want to “witch” my problems away. Although I assume that using magic to solve your problems makes a demand for more effort later to resolve your problems. But the Little Mermaid (and Brother Bear, Beauty and the Beast, and Cinderella) needed magic for its storyline, so I am going to give Brave the benefit of the doubt.

Eek! Brave looks really good. Brave comes out June 22nd, 2012.

“It’s also just barely possible to think you make a statement about gender when you work a fake nerd look. While nerds, as everybody knows, tend to be male more often than female, dressing like a nerd rejects conventional ideas about what a hunky young man looks like. Since conventional notions of what makes a young man look handsome are so bound up with conveying power and wealth and the capacity for punching somebody out, making yourself look like a nerd on purpose is a gesture that says, “I renounce the privilege of being a young swinging dick.” At the very least, it’s a refusal to make your outfit a monument to your own authority. For a woman, dressing up as a fake nerd is a refusal of plumage. In an androgynous paradise where adults of both sexes look like enlarged spelling-bee champions, it’s easy to forget for a moment, or even an entire night of drinking beer, that privilege is unevenly distributed between genders. At least, it’s easy if you’re male.” (125)

“Leetspeak dates back to the early bulletin board systems of the 1980s, when even short messages were so arduous to send that users truncated “you are” to “u r” and so on … This new slang was developed largely by young men, and it has come to resemble, more than anything else, the language spoken by the delinquents in Anthony Burgess’s Clockwork Orange … Leetspeak shares with that fictional slang system a tendency to align good with violence and sex. In addition to rape, there’s slut as a word for being skilled. “I slut at SSBM,” for example, means “I’m good at Super Smash Bros. Melee.” One of the reasons to create your own elite slang system is to give yourself the feeling of belonging to a special, empowered group. The vocabulary of the language, in this case, reflects that will to power, the need for one-upmanship, the fantasy of violence and violent sex.” (155-156)
“I think about death; that is, I think about how little time we get and how much time we spend inventing and following rules that make us feel immortal and safe.” (209)
Nugent, Benjamin. American Nerd: The Story of My People. New York: Scribner, 2008. Print.